Some Random Thoughts on iOS 7.01, Siri and Buying the 5s

I live 75 miles from the nearest Apple store but we do have an ATT store in town. I got there at 11:30 and managed to snag their last iPhone 5s. They serve a small, rural market with a total regional population of about 50,000 and received only 15 of the 5ses (?). And were sold out at 11:31. Given that I assume that every store will be sold out if they are not already.

I traded in my 2 year old iPhone 4s for $205 so the net (with a 2 year contract) was $118 after taxes. I recognize that I could have sold my 4s on eBay but this was a convenient and trouble free option that took all of 5 minutes.

In talking to my rep and several other ATT and Verizon reps over the past few weeks, they apparently make somewhere on the order of $5 when they sell an iPhone compared to the nearly $20 they make when they sell a Samsung. You can imagine how that changes the showroom floor dynamics with undecided customers. The moral: if you buying an iPhone from an ATT store, be polite and think about leaving a tip.

As soon as I started to restore from backup Apple notified me that iOS 7.01 had been released. I have been playing with it on my 4s for a few days and was likeing it and while the speed was great the battery life was really sucking and acting very weird. So maybe this will fix that. Not sure.

Siri on the other hand has become quite the capable transcriber. Not only has her understanding taken a huge leap she can now read AND send emails. That is very cool. I dictated several fairly complicated emails WHILE RIDING MY BIKE and she sent them flawlessly.

Please consider leaving a comment as your input will help me (& everyone else) better understand and learn about local.

Some Random Thoughts on iOS 7.01, Siri and Buying the 5s
by Mike Blumenthal

Go into settings > General > background app update and turn it off. This is so apps can update automatically in the background when you are not using them, and if you have a lot of apps open it can be a real battery suck.

I upgraded my iPad Mini; a couple of apps needed some tweaking, other than that, it’s been good. Holding off on the iPhone until they get things a bit tighter.

Interesting to hear about the large commission gap between iPhone and Samsung.

($5.00 commission…) “uhhm, we don’t have any iPhones in stock, they really haven’t been selling all that well, but we do have a very few of the new, incredible, better, sleeker, faster, Samsung models in stock, would you like to look at one of those instead?